Apple implements 'Answers from the Community' in the Apple Store

Apple has also added the ability to participate in the community discussions from the product pages in the Apple Store.  If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you will see a community section that contains recent or common questions that people ask in the support communities. It will also offer you options to search questions, answer those listed, or search for similar questions by clicking a link. In addition, you can browse through questions by category and sort them by various criteria.This change appears to be an effort to bring the Apple Communities and the rest of the Apple Web site together, with a question and answer option that users can quickly access.This option is one of several that are available to Mac users for getting help with their systems. Another one that we offer here is the Question and Answers feature at MacFixIt. You can use the submissions box to the left of MacFixIt articles or the e-mail links at the bottom of each article to submit questions you have about Mac systems, some of which we publish in our weekly MacFixIt Answers column.When you click the link, this page will show where you can search for questions and answers.Screenshot by Topher KesslerQuestions? Comments? Have a fix? Post them below or e-mail us!Be sure to check us out on Twitter and the CNET Mac forums.

Apple iCloud services offline for a few million users

Update at 9:30 a.m. PT: All services were restored as of 8:30 a.m. PT.Apple iCloud users were hit by yet another outage, though this one seems to have affected a relatively small percentage of users.As of Thursday 4 a.m. PT, Apple's status page reveals issues with iMessage, Photo Stream, Documents in the Cloud, Backup and Restore, and iPhoto Journals. Apple's description of the problem reports that people may be unable to use those services and unable to send or download attachments in iMessage.The page says that less than 1 percent of users were affected. Just how many people does that include? In April, Apple said that its iCloud user population had jumped to 300 million. So that means these services may have been out of commission for just under 3 million people.Apple's status page also indicates that the outage started Wednesday around 9:30 p.m. PT and that it was resolved Thursday around 8:30 a.m. PT.(Via AppleInsider)